Several nineteenth-century events markedly changed the position of British
Catholics and their church. First, in 1829 Parliament
granted them full civil rights, including the right to serve in the legislature.
In 1840 Parliament followed this dramatic change in the condition and power
of Roman Catholics by disestablishing — or removing the official tax-supported
status of — the Anglican Church in predominantly Catholic Ireland. The
Oxford Movement, or Tractarianism, began as a reaction to what
Keble, Newman,
Pusey, and others believed was an illegal and unchristian interference by
government in the affairs of God's Church. Ironically, it ended by defending
many Catholic practices and rituals, such as elaborate ritual, confession, celibacy,
and monastic orders, long rejected by British Protestants. As Newman and some
of the other Tractarians attempted to distinguish Protestant from Catholic positions
on the basis of church history and traditions, they found themselves drawn to
the the faith they had initially attacked and ended by converting to a religion
many in Britain considered subversive
and fundamentally anti-British. When in 1850 Pope Pius IX reinstated
the Roman Catholic church organization, including parishes and dioceses,
many in Protestants feared the worst, and their fears only increased when the
Vatican Council of 1869-70 declared the Pope's pronouncements on morals and
doctrine infallible, or incapable of
error.